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Friday, September 7, 2012

Going Down

Azraal had literally dived for the desk. He'd just barely made it in one desperate
bound, too. He caught himself on the
desk, one hand clapped on the corner and the other reaching wildly across the
surface, groping for the dagger.

As he turned to throw the knife at me, I focused again, and
channeled Left Ear from the Italian Job.
I mentally ripped a hole in every floor of the building and the ceiling
above me, and then forced it to become a reality.

As Azraal spun and hurled the dagger, a chunk of the ceiling
above me came loose in a jagged little circle around where the meat hook was
mounted. Simultaneously, the floor
beneath my head crumbled, leaving just enough of a hole for my body to fall
through. I'd done it just in time, too,
because as I fell, I felt the knife clang off of the meat hook just before I
disappeared beneath the floor. It sent
agonizing vibrations along the hook and into my bloody feet, but it was a small
price to pay for avoiding its poison.

I hurtled down three floors and collapsed painfully on the
ground level. I was aware, in the back
of my mind, that this would probably have killed me if I'd still been
completely human. Instead, I was simply
in an intense amount of pain.

"He's on the ground floor!" I heard Azraal bellow
from above me. "Get him, you
dumbfucks!" I heard some rumbling
and considered that perhaps some of the more powerful demons on the fourth
floor were about to attempt the stunt I'd just pulled.

I sat up, hurriedly but gingerly pulled the hook out of my
feet, and tossed it aside. I got to my
feet, wincing at the pain, and, realizing that my fate depended heavily on my
ability to quit worrying about the pain and just
fucking move, I limped forward as fast as I could.

Azraal erupted through the ceiling behind me, and a few of
his security goons were only seconds behind him. He still had the knife and an unwounded pair
of feet. He was coming fast.